Gangs of Freeport. This is an interesting module. Written by Adamant Press, and slotting in basically right before Crisis in Freeport since Xander Williams still features as a character but it's obviously after the fall of Milton Drac, it makes pretty good use of locations and characters from previous Freeport products. It's certainly grounded in the setting in some ways even more than official products for the setting. It's 49 pages long, but there's no art at all, and the layout is pretty spartan and features a decent amount of white space. I don't think it's really much longer in terms of wordcount than your typical ~35 page or so module. Seriously, there's not even cover art. The only concession to art of any kind are some crudely made maps here and there.
I do really love the crime lords of Five Fingers. That's probably its best element, honestly. I like its dark cult and horror theming too, but I have little interest in the specific Iron Kingdoms Thamar cults, and Orgoth history, and... well, all of the campaign specific stuff. Iron Kingdoms was one of my favorite settings in the early 00s, but as it developed and became a high powered superhero setting to accommodate the wargames and compete with Games Workshop, it kind of lost its way over time. Which is part of the reason that Five Fingers was such a delight, because it was a pretty late book in the line, and yet it had the original theme and tone which made me like Iron Kingdoms so much in the first place.
That said; just because I like it doesn't mean that I want to set my own games there, so a lot of the details just don't do it for me because they're too specific to the setting. But I'm not reviewing Five Fingers; "Gangs of Freeport" is a pretty solid, low magic module that could be adapted with almost no real work to any level up to the level that it's posted for. Higher magic, i.e. higher level D&D would start to cause problems with it, though. I found it refreshing to read, even though my earlier reading of "Crisis" (should have swapped the order, but whatever) indicates that Freeport had returned to that same kind of low magic theme and tone too. Next up on the Freeport Trawl are the Bleeding Edge adventures, which as I've said before, don't actually take place in Freeport (with the exception of the last one) but are nominally set in the Freeport setting. Even then, they're deliberately designed, at least according to the blurbs, to be capable of being slotted into any setting, and being stand-alone, although loosely tied together if you wanted to turn it into a pseudo Bleeding Edge Adventure Path or something.
Of course, Adventure Paths were just starting the same year that this came out, I think.
Grasp of the Emerald Claw. My Eberron Trawl will probably slow down, because I just finished this module, and next up is Race of Eberron. I've actually got a pretty full docket of physical game books to read, and squeezing this in, near the front of the line no less, probably isn't going to happen. So Eberron will "rest" for a time, I think, while I read some other stuff instead. This module was quite the contrast to "Gangs of Freeport"; it's a very stereotypical D&D adventure in many ways. It's got much denser text; while only 36 pages long, compared to "Gangs"' 49, I think it had more actual words. There was all kind of silly stuff; puzzles and riddles that cause you to teleport to where you want to go, wandering "dire tigers" within the temple complex, etc. "Grasp" is also the fourth of four in a proto-Adventure Path of sorts made up of the three modules published thus far plus the mini-module included in the campaign setting book of Eberron, but one of the key elements of the concept of the adventure path; a coherent meta narrative that connects the modules and builds within them to a peak near the end, was poorly rendered here; I'm not sure if the authors of the modules had a guiding hand that ensured such a thing happened, which Paizo's guys certainly did do and focused on.
I feel like the structure of the Eberron modules was a little too focused on "here's a little dungeon, of sorts, so play it and then zip off to the other side of the world and do another little dungeon of sorts." I've never liked that style of play, so these three (or four, if you count the one in the setting book) weren't my favorite. Not that I expected them to be, but they were even less intriguing to me than I hoped, and just the novelty of being set in Eberron, and having fast travel and a warforged antagonist and "shades of gray" semi-noir alignment issues and vague hints about the origin of warforged in Xen'drik with the Age of Giants wasn't enough to liberate them from being pretty run-of-the-mill dungeon-crawlers. And not only do I not really like dungeon-crawlers very much anyway, but these weren't even super good ones, like "Shadows in Freeport" was; they were just "meh" dungeon-crawlers. What was probably the most interesting aspect of this module specifically was the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea inspired submarine journey to Xen'drik from Sharn with an attack by sea devils and a dire shark. But, of course, it's exactly that kind of stuff that has people saying stuff like "magitech" and "magipunk" and calling Eberron a steampunk setting. Or worse; trying to coin a new term to describe it. (As an aside, I'm more irritated than not these days by the gratuitous apostrophe in Xen'drik. And the gratuitous use of X instead of Z, honestly, which is harder to type.)
Like my discussion of Iron Kingdoms above, a little bit; Eberron is always a setting that I liked. But I feel like it was poorly served by some of its details, which actually fought against the concepts of the setting sometimes. And other details just weren't how I would have implemented them. This particular series of modules is a great example of that. They're not bad, they're just forgettable and not my style of module. I'm glad I finally read the entire run after having played the first one many years ago. (I realize that there are two more official Eberron modules, but those are not part of the same "arc" and are completely stand-alone relative to these other three.)
The Naked Gun. I noticed that this is on Amazon Prime and that I could watch it "for free" by which I mean, what I already pay and with several commercials at the beginning, I didn't have to pay extra to watch it. I always wanted to watch this, but never got around to it. I was a huge fan of the original Naked Gun movie and the Police Squad show on which it was based. The new Naked Gun is pretty well-meaning. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson do a good job, as do the other minor roles. The writers and creators honestly wanted to ditch a lot of the problems Hollywood has developed in the last few years and make a throwback movie that was like the older Naked Gun and its whole style of movie.
That said, it simply isn't as funny as the originals. It was well-meaning, and it tried to be the same kind of movie. But it didn't have nearly as many gags as the original. The density of gags was much lower, which meant that I was laughing a lot less. Plus, the gags were much more low-key. One of the keys to the original Airplane and Naked Gun's success (same team of creators) was that they ran gags down until they were absolutely ridiculous. Here, they are content to merely be drily sarcastic, overly literal, and stuff like that and consider that a gag. And they're funny, don't get me wrong. But they're not as funny, and there aren't as many of them, so overall, the movie is merely amusing rather than hilarious, like its predecessors. The only gag that was as ridiculous as the originals is when the guy was watching Neeson and Anderson through a wall with infrared binoculars and it looks like they're having freaky sex, only to cut to the room and see that everything is innocent and it's just the angles that make it look funny. And that was ridiculous, but it was also too dirty to be funny to a guy my age. I'm not 13 anymore, and more and more I don't even remember why I thought 13-year old me thought stupid things like that funny. Maybe that's down to me rather than the movie, but also the fact that it's the only sequence that really rises to the level of what the original did. The original had exaggerated, extended, ridiculous sequences: 1) when Drebin was going to the bathroom and forgot to turn off his mike, 2) when Drebin was sneaking around on the skyscraper, 3) when Drebin was pretending to be the opera singer singing the national anthem, and 4) when Drebin was pretending to be the umpire during the baseball game. The new one had only one such sequence, and it was, like the skyscraper one, one that relied on puerile sex-adjacent humor.
In any case, the shorter, less exaggerated sequences in the original were much more plentiful and much more funny, and the longer exaggerated ones really make you fall out of your chair because you're laughing so hard sequences are also much more frequent and much more funny. And some of the shorter ones are almost as long and ridiculous; Drebin and the pen that killed the fish. Drebin fighting the terrorist and communist world leaders, OJ slowly "dying" on the boat, etc. This new movie just didn't have those kinds of sequences.
Of course, I also watched the movie by myself. Comedies are rarely as funny by yourself as they are with a friend, my wife, my kids, etc. But it really just wasn't as funny, and it really didn't quite rise to the same level. And the funniest stuff was in the trailer.
I'm glad it got made. I'm glad I watched it. But I'll forget it in a few days and probably never think of it again.
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